Bolivia: La Avanzada

Origin

• 🇧🇴 Bolivia

Tasting notes

Character

• Bright
  30
• Funky
  25
• Clean
  20

Bolivia: Jeivert Panuni, HoneyHoney processThe skin is removed but some sticky fruit mucilage is left on during drying. Lands between washed and natural: more sweetness and body than washed, cleaner than natural. Raspberry , blackberry and redcurrant layer up in the cup like a summer berry medley, bright and juicyAcidityThe bright, lively, fruit-like sensation in coffee — praise, not a flaw. Citric sparkle, malic apple-crispness, tartaric wine notes; light roasts preserve more of it. from the first sip, before shifting to a sweet cooked apple finish. The remote region of Irupana sits in the South Yungas province towards the most westerly edge of Bolivia, nestled among the Andes at the edge of the country. It's to the south of Caranavi, the largest coffee-growing region in Bolivia, and shares a similar verdant – albeit slightly drier – high-altitude terrain that makes it excellent for growing coffee. Farms here are small (around 5 hectares on average) and the area has a strong, proud tradition of coffee farming. It's also a place with deep historical roots: Irupana was home to Pedro Domingo Murillo, a late 18th-century revolutionary who led the 1809 uprising against Spanish rule in La Paz, before being defeated by royalist forces at the Battle of Irupana and executed in 1810. He's remembered today as one of Bolivia's great independence martyrs. We've only sourced coffee from Irupana a handful of times previously. Coffee from more remote parts of Bolivia is often made up of contributions from multiple smallholdersSmallholderA farmer growing coffee on a small family plot — often under two hectares. Most of the world's coffee is grown this way, typically pooled at cooperatives or washing stations., which means we can't always trace it back to individual farms. Thanks to improved traceability and deeper collaboration with the Sol de la Mañana programme, we're now seeing more single-producer lots like this one from Jeivert – and Roland was particularly excited about that development for the 2025 harvest. We actually bought a coffee from Jeivert back in 2016, but didn't see more coffee from him. This year, our friends at Agricafe (who run the mill and export the coffee for us) put some of his coffees on a blind cuppingCuppingThe standardized tasting ritual — coarse grounds steeped in hot water, crust broken, slurped from a spoon — used to score and compare coffees. table and they really jumped out for all of us! The town of Irupana is at about 1,800 metres above sea level and has a drier microclimate than Caranavi. The coffee farms around the town are on the hills which surround it and reach up to 2, 000 metres above sea level - it's a very traditi